This report is focused around Lost and Found data using the intakes and outcomes data received for 2019-2020. Its goal is to reflect everything we could learn about L&F from the available data, make sure the numbers we see make sense, and highlight things that would be useful to show but some/all data required for them are missing.
Date range: 2019-01-01 to 2020-11-30
Scroll down or use the table of contents on the left to navigate throughout the document. Most sections contain multiple tabs showing different facets of a data type. Most plots are interactive, meaning they include tooltips and allow hiding and showing parts and zooming in and out. If something went wrong, look for the house icon in the top right corner of each figure to reset.
This section provides an overview of the RTH rate per year divided by species.
This table covers all strays and RTHs. RTH rates shown below are the number of strays with RTO outcome out of all strays. Importantly, there were about 3000 animals across 2019-2020 that did not have a ‘species’ value, so they were excluded from the entire report.
When we go over this, let’s make sure we calculate the rate the same way you do, so we would want to make sure what we see makes sense. If these numbers are right, they are around the HASS average of 30%, showing a small increase from 2019 into 2020.
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2019 | 2300 | 36 | 0.02 |
| Cat | 2020 | 1440 | 33 | 0.02 |
| Dog | 2019 | 3198 | 883 | 0.28 |
| Dog | 2020 | 2085 | 651 | 0.31 |
This one only counts animals who came in as strays from the field. Normally, we would then split these by RTH method between RTO in the field and in the shelter, but since there were only 5 animals with the ‘field’ outcome subtype for RTOs, this is left out.
The RTH rate is slightly highere for field intakes than the rate for OTC animals which appear on the next tab.
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2019 | 748 | 19 | 0.03 |
| Cat | 2020 | 621 | 19 | 0.03 |
| Dog | 2019 | 2409 | 711 | 0.30 |
| Dog | 2020 | 1640 | 538 | 0.33 |
| Other | 2019 | 11 | 1 | 0.09 |
This shows the numbers only for strays that were public drop offs, which is slightly lower than field intakes for dogs (33% vs. 26% in 2020).
| Species | Year | Strays | RTH_Count | RTH_Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | 2019 | 1505 | 16 | 0.01 |
| Cat | 2020 | 750 | 10 | 0.01 |
| Dog | 2019 | 755 | 161 | 0.21 |
| Dog | 2020 | 422 | 108 | 0.26 |
This time series shows the RTH rate per month, to show whether there were times with particularly high or low rates as well as the overall trajectory.
It seems like the return rate for dogs has been pretty consistently increasing since 2019 into 2020, with a noticeable peak in April 2020.
We also looked at these graphs for field or OTC intakes only, but they looked fairly similar to the overall one, so we left them out.
This section shows the number of stray intakes over time, as well as the breakdown of strays by field/shelter intake. It mainly helps us get a sense of your intake volumes.
Field intakes seem to be the majority (again this is mostly context for us, this is probably no news for you).
The average difference in length of stay (in days) between strays with RTH outcomes and all other strays is shown in the table below – roughly 8 days for dogs and 5 for cats when looking at the average.
That means that every successful RTH saves 8 days of care on average at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Services, and field RTH would save an extra day or two on average for RTH from the shelter.
This could translate to pretty significant cost savings at scale – assuming a daily cost of care of 30$, if 500 more dogs were returned home in 2020, it would have saved Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Services about $120,000 in costs of care. This is a fairly simple calculation, but it gets at the magnitude of the potential benefits.
| Species | Outcome | Count | Average_Length_Of_Stay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cat | Other Outcomes | 2198 | 13.78 |
| Cat | RTO | 69 | 8.67 |
| Dog | Other Outcomes | 2494 | 9.79 |
| Dog | RTO | 1534 | 1.93 |
The following maps show stray intake and RTH rate by ZIP code to highlight geographical patterns. The first and second tab are similar to previous metrics; the third tab, RTH Gap, shows the number of strays who were not returned home per ZIP code.
The data used in this section is the ‘found zip’ field in the files sent to HASS. We tried to use the crossing field field which would provide the more accurate location, but it was missing for most animals - about 5300 of the roughly 9000 strays in the data. And when there was a value, it was often a reference to a ‘source address’ in that field, so if there is another location field that would be better to plot here, we can do that! Using a specific address will also help us narrow down the map from a ZIP code level to something more granular like a Census tract.
Found ZIP code was also missing often, especially for cats for 3703 animals, so these maps only represent those with non-null values - 3970 dogs and 972 cats (in the next section).
The ZIP codes mapped below are only those with prefix 27, 28, and 29. These seemed to be accounting for the majority of animals.
The area around the airport stands out most clearly.
Note that the areas with the highest stray intake also have among the lowest RTH rate, and vice versa.
This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists - it shows the number of strays NOT returned to home in each area. As the RTH rate is fairly low in the areas with the highest stray intakes, it looks pretty similar to the first map.
Overall, these maps show data for 3962 stray dogs of which 1214 were RTH.
This is similar to the maps above, but for 972 cats. Similar areas stand out to the dogs map.
Since RTH rate is pretty low across the city, it is also low throughout in this map.
This is very similar to the stray map because of the low RTH occurrence for cats.
Showing 936 stray cats of which 34 were RTH.
With specific location data, one analysis that many shelters found helpful is finding how far from home do RTO dogs go when they are found by finding the distance between their found and outcome addreess.
Here, we tried to do some proxy of that with the available found and outcome ZIP code data. We also looked at the similarity between found and finder ZIP code to identify how often people find animals when outside their neighborhood (ZIP code). We found that:
68% of all dogs who were RTO were found in the ZIP code to which they were eventually returned. Working with addresses rather than ZIP codes will help narrow down this finding, as a ZIP code could be quite large.
46% of all stray animals (dogs and cats) were found and picked up by a person who does not live in that same ZIP code. So fairly often people pick up loose animals even when they are away from their home (whereas the first statistic suggests that it is likely to be around animal’s home).
The map below shows the first statistic per ZIP code – what % of dogs found in that ZIP code were also RTOd into that ZIP code (hence live there). It’s noteworthy that in some high intake areas this is even higher than average, e.g. 81% of dogs found in 28216 also live there, even though in about half the times they were found by someone who is not from the neighborhood.
Found location - as mentioned above, if there is a better field for mapping, we could do that, although it was missing for a majority of animals.
Species were missing for many animals, which had to be excluded.
If in 2021 returns in the field have become more frequent, we can look at the RTH rates separtely with the newer data.
The crossing field sometimes included references to no microchip found - is this how you track this data?
Other things we could show if we had the data for it:
Thanks for reading through, and we’re looking forward to talking through it and thinking about more ways to make this data useful for you.